Archives

Categories

Google Cloud Architect

Spent alot of time reading the docs and going through Coursera lessons, plus all the hands-on experience over the past 3/4 of a year really helped a lot.

Cloud Architect is geared toward use of Google Cloud Platform, focusing on almost all aspects of the networking, compute, machine learning, data management, identity, security, solutions design etc. It’s a super alot of information and products that are covered.

Gsuite is much simpler and covers setting up and managing a Gsuite domain, quite a lot of details but far less.

There were very few resources on Cloud Architect to go on. Here are some tips and areas to focus on:

Make sure you have hands-on experience in setting up basic networks, VMs, resources. As much hands-on experience as possible. It will be super useful in having a feel of where things go and what workload or design is appropriate. You could do this before or after reading the docs and taking classes.

Official docs at https://cloud.google.com/ Read through all the intros, docs, FAQs. There’s alot of good and updated information inside here. It’s quite lengthy and dry so you might want to do this back and forth with all other resources.

Official study guide and case studies at https://cloud.google.com/certification/guides/cloud-architect/ The case studies are used in the actual exams and they might introduce more, who knows. So you should just read through and familiarize yourself beforehand as much as possible. Think about what you might design. You don’t need to memorize anything here.

Coursera courses are recommended, and designed by Google official trainer. This set https://www.coursera.org/specializations/gcp-architecture is pretty good. You can just listen through the videos, try the guided tutorials which have good hands-on experience in most aspects. You can get through all four courses within a month very quickly. If you have extra time, you can also try the single course designed for AWS professionals, it has a slightly different perspective which is nice.

I believe there is a new linuxacademy course but I didn’t try that.

In-person courses weren’t really necessary, I didn’t have access and it was too expensive.

Cloud Next Youtube videos are quite informative. But there are too many to finish. Worth a listen as they have nice real-life scenarios with real clients. Good tips in many areas.

Knowing how to debug certain errors or issues are good to know as well. Unfortunately this is hard to come by in lesson or tutorial which is why I strongly encourage hands-on experimentation or real-life use if possible. Although this might be tough to expect.

Note that the exam was largely design at the start of 2017, same for the Courses, whereas online documentation is up-to-date and evolving every single week. GCP launches new products, new changes, updates, new price discounts like all the time. It’s a very fast paced platform, so some difference might be there. However don’t worry too much most of the concepts stay the same. Of course you can expect the newest latest tool will probably not be into the exam yet.

Good luck and have fun getting into GCP. It’s gonna be useful and informative even if you’ve a regular GCP user as the platform is so wide in scope.